Trope Talk
by David Ishihara
Summary: This is basically a section where I break down popular tropes in media. I'd recommend watching Overly Sarcastic Productions' videos before reading these. Seriously, you should. They're all great!
1. Reformed Villains

Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!

Man, villains are great, aren't they? I mean, what's not to love? They provide constant conflict, drive the plot, spark at least three unnecessary ship wars each, not to mention how evil they tend to be.

They can be cruel and sadistic, if that's your thing, or working towards what they believe is a necessary evil, or just a misunderstood puppy dog with a load of personal trauma, the possibilities are endless here.

The only requirement that makes a character a villain is that they oppose the hero, although if you want to get nitpicky, that technically makes them antagonists. But beyond that characteristic, you got a whole sandbox of possibilities. But do you know what's even better than a villain? A reformed villain! Because everyone likes a good bad guy, but everyone REALLY likes a GOOD bad guy.

Not only does it lead to the idea that there's a flicker of goodness inside all of us, but it also lets you take all of those great villain-hero dynamics you previously explored and protagonistify them into good quality banter between your newly expanded posse of heroes.

Now, there are a ton of reasons for villains to turn good. But they're almost always highly personalized, because they have to arise from the character of the villain themselves. This is also why the purely-cartoonishly evil bad guys rarely get to turn good. Usually, they don't have a lot of character behind the whole villain thing. In some cases, they turn good and reveal that their villainy had a legitimate character-driven reason behind it and become a much more well-rounded character in the process. But for the most part, Disney Evil is there to provide evil in opposition to the heroes. They don't normally get the chance to change their tune.

But a real well-rounded bad guy can find all kinds of reasons to fight for good. Reasons may include the realization that their motivations were lackluster compared to the heroes, a fundamental change of heart, or they woke up one morning and realize that a military uniform incorporating a skull might not be considered good. Their mind is your test lab and there are so many possibilities.

The trick is you're not flipping some morality switch and turn them from bad to good. You're arranging for circumstances where the villain SIDES with the heroes instead of opposing them. And those circumstances depend on the villain, the hero, and what circumstances drove them to oppose each other in the first place. These include the villain being misguided and have been tricked into villainy, in which case proof of their boss's malevolence is liable to be enough to shun them to the side of the heroes, being won over by the power of friendship, or their villainous higher-up treating them bad enough that they have a crisis of morality and side with the good guys just to spite their boss. Or it could be like a million other things!

Let's take Zuko as an example of the complexities you can dive into. And… I can't talk about him without going through his backstory, so for those of you that haven't seen "Avatar: The Last Airbender", here's a big spoiler alert!

See, Zuko didn't technically stop being a bad guy until episode 51...of 61. That's when he officially decided to join team good guy. In part because he realizes how screwed up his evil family is, in part because he re-examines his priorities and what exactly he wants out of his life, and in part because destiny said so.

Now, what makes it interesting is that fans have been rooting for him to turn good from episode 3 onward, which is when we first start to get a sense of how badly the rest of the Fire Nation treats him. He's been sent out on a fool's errand to capture the Avatar, someone everyone thinks is dead and when it turns out he's NOT dead, the entire rest of the Fire Nation starts doing everything in their power to capture him first, and Zuko was only doing this because he thinks it'll make his father care about him. A father who, mind you, spends his first major on-screen appearance BURNING HALF OF ZUKO'S FACE OFF!

He spends the rest of Season 1 running himself ragged trying to dodge the Fire Navy and capture the hero which, you know, capturing a hero is an objectively bad thing to do.

And then in Season 2, despite still being an antagonist for the most part, he officially becomes a fugitive from his own nation being hunted by his abusive, sadistic, and sociopathic sister who was harboring some pretty crazy favoritism issues of her own.

Now, not only is Zuko a bad guy, he's the first bad guy we're introduced to, and by far the one with the most intense drive to capture Aang. Everyone else is basically doing it to spite Zuko. He's objectively an antagonist, and one of the most persistent ones throughout the series, but it's really bad for him as a person. He's in a really bad place for most of the series, nearly killing himself in the process of trying to scrape up some semblance of love from his insane awful family. He's angry and unstable and not in a fun way, but in a "somebody get this kid a hug, a nap, a hot meal, and a friend" sort of way.

In a weird way, we've been rooting for both him and Aang, even though their goals are by definition opposed. But we're rooting for Zuko to figure out that his home life is terrible and he deserves to have good things happen to him, and when he finally does and in the process denounces his terrible father and becomes a hero, it's amazing!

Before that big heel-face turn, there are a ton of situation where Zuko sides with one or more of the good guys. One notable example involving actively breaking Aang out of prison very early on. These temporary pseudo-alliances where they're fighting on the same side even if they'd be fighting each other at any other time are the result of the fact that Zuko's villainous motivation is highly situational. If anyone else is around to capture Aang, Zuko is almost more dangerous to that guy than the good guys are. If not, he's the major threat to the good guys.

He's unquestionably an antagonist to begin with, but his character development leads up to him officially renouncing his big screwed up family and joining the side of good, a transition that's almost the end of his Character Arc, where is in a lot of other stories, getting good guys to stand on their forehead is step 1 of anti-villainous character development.

So this is a Redemption Arc done really, really right. It naturally arises from the character in his circumstances, his dynamics with the team are good both before and after he joins them, his goodness doesn't come out of nowhere, and the traits that made him bad are properly addressed.

Not only that, despite the intervention of his uncle, his decision to become a good guy is just that. His decision. He doesn't get turned by a heartfelt chat with the heroes where he learned their side of things, the terrible family doesn't do something extra terrible to push him over the edge, he basically comes to the conclusion on his own after bypassing several more typical plot-induced paths to heroism, that the life he thought he wanted is not the life he actually wanted and that propelled him into re-examining his priorities and ultimately joining the good guys on his own.

Now, there are a million other ways to turn your bad guys good and they basically fall on a sliding scale between all the villain's decision and all someone else's decision. Zuko is on the far end of the spectrum while more typical cases fall somewhere in the middle. The villain might change their mind after a heartfelt conversation with the hero, convincing them to join their side or get tipped over the edge by a villain on their side going really extra villainous, causing them to re-evaluate.

Dragon Ball Z's Vegeta is a good example of a middle range transition to heroism. He has a very, very slow journey to the side of good and it's got almost no moral component to it. And Vegeta is a major character in DBZ, so another spoiler warning!

The only thing initially motivating him is the constant assault on his pride by the fact that everyone keeps mopping the floor with him because his character is basically only there to establish how extra scary these new bad guys are. The first arc where he can be considered anything resembling a protagonist is the Frieza Arc, which is fairly early on, but that's just an enemy of his enemy desperation move. After that, despite being largely considered a good guy, or at least not explicitly a bad guy by the other good guys, he has a tendency to cause more problems than he solves, all because of his pride.

He lets Cell absorb Android 18 and reach his Perfect Form to get a good fight and therefore directly causes every problem in that arc, up to and including Goku dying, almost for real this time.

In the end, it's his family that anchors him to the side of good for reasons that extend beyond practicality for a change. His long suppressed or ignored love for his son flares up when the kid takes a laser to the chest and it suddenly occurs to him that he actually doesn't want most of these people dead, except maybe Goku sometimes.

After that, with one not-so-minor setback thanks to the pride thing again, he pretty much slides seamlessly into grumpy aggressive heroism thanks to the compassion he accidentally developed for the people in his life, which in turn is thanks to the fact that nobody in the DBZ universe bats an eyelash at rooming with someone that spent all of last week trying and/or succeeding at murdering them and everyone they love.

Favorable circumstances allow him to become a good guy and despite waffling back and forth a whole bunch, he does eventually bridge the gap on his own with a pretty cool act of self-sacrifice that, because it's Dragon Ball, obviously isn't permanent.

The convenient thing about DBZ is that even if redemption equals death, that usually just means they'll get to be redeemed and alive again in the space of a year at most.

Anyway, on the opposite side of the spectrum from Zuko, some villains are redeemed entirely through the actions of others, usually because they're evil because they're taken over by some kind of evil essence and they become good after getting that evil scrubbed off by a friendship laser or something.

That's a situation where their character has almost no bearing on their morality or lack thereof, so their moral flip-flop has almost no input from them. Also, that mostly shows up in like, kids shows.

Anyway, that pretty much covers how a villain can turn from bad to good. There's playing mechanisms which we largely categorized by how much introspection the villain in question did before transitioning to the side of good and how much of their own decision it was. That's all cool.

So what happens next? See, in some universe, the heroes brush off attempted murder like it ain't no thing. Doesn't matter if you're still swaddled in anime bandages from the last time you two interacted, if they're ready to be a good guy, that blood loss is suspiciously rusty water under the bridge.

But in others, the heroes might reasonably hold a grudge. Sure, maybe the villain has changed, or maybe they haven't, or maybe it doesn't matter because the last time you fought, they punched a hole in your chest and you're still grumpy. These are all fair reactions from your characters. So, what do you do?

Well, in some cases, the newly reformed villain doesn't explicitly join the heroes, which helps reduce any lingering grumpiness. They're not trying to join the friend group, they're just tangentially on their side. Conversely, sometimes the reformed villain doesn't want to join the squad, but the squad drags them in anyway. But in a lot of cases, they do want to join the squad but the squad might not feel the same way.

This can be tricky to make feel...convincing. The longer they've been a villain, the more bad blood you potentially have between them and the good guys. Maybe they did some really bad stuff, and at least one of the characters really doesn't want to forgive them for that stuff. The more convincingly villainous they were before, the harder it will be to convince the audience or the heroes that they've changed, so this can be a slow process.

Generally, they win over heroes gradually, maybe one or two at a time or with some grand dramatic act of self-sacrifice that demonstrates that they're willing to throw everything away for their new cause. Combining the two works pretty well.

Okay, so you've convinced the heroes. Your bad guy is now good, your good guys now have some funny banter about that one time your former bad guy dangled them over a cliff or something. Good times are had by all.

But wait! There's someone you forgot to convince. It's your audience. There are a number of ways you can lose your audience by turning your villains good. In the simplest of cases, they might like the bad guy less now that the bad guy is question is emotionally stable and probably not wearing quite so much black. In some cases, the bad guy may have done some seriously heinous stuff in the past and while the characters are willing to forgive and forget, the readers might not be.

That's actually a problem people say they have with Fairy Tail. For those of you deeper in anime circles than I am, you'll probably know better than I do that Fairy Tail had this thing where 90% of early villains in that show become heroes less than a season later. After like the third time this happened, everyone started being like "Oh boy. More bad guys. Can't wait to see how Natsu turns them good." And as a result, it almost seemed like the author felt the need to make every season bad-guy way more evil than the previous one, so no way would we expect them to turn good. "Oh, you thought the guy who crucified a teenage girl was bad? Well, these guys murdered their dragon parents, and this lady tortured the protagonist on screen and this guy invented Black Magic and uncontrollably kills everything in a 10 yard radius. No way can any of these guys be- Aw, damn it!"

Now, this can pull people out of the story a little. If the bad guys don't go anywhere or if they do go somewhere, but that somewhere is the expanding roster of tertiary good guys, it can get kind of old and lose its spark, and if the villains are too easily forgiven by the heroes, it can pull the audience away from the heroes and make it harder to relate. On the flipside, you can get cases where the audience WANTS the villain to be redeemed, but the heroes are mistrustful. This can also pull us away from the heroes but instead of pulling us out of the story, it pulls us toward the former villain, which can lead to some interesting sympathy scenarios where we've completely switched who we're rooting for. Again, they did this with Zuko, and it was awesome.

This is basically discussing the actual process and immediate consequences of the bad guy switching sides. But in the long term, there are some interesting stuff you can do with a good guy that used to be bad.

See, in a lot of cases, the heroes don't forget that their new friend used to be a bad guy. They might bring it up in a joking fashion or a not-so-joking fashion if the former bad guy seem to have retained some old habits from their erstwhile villainy.

And of course, on the more extreme end, what do you do if the former villain switches back? This is a pretty common story for redeemed villains, and it's easy to see why. A villain that has been redeemed by definition has a flexible sense of right and wrong. It's very plausible both for the audience and the heroes that maybe they switched back and they're up to their old tricks again. There are three ways to play this.

They really have changed back.

They were never really good in the first place.

They're lying their butt off to trick the heroes and whatever villains they allied themselves with, relying on their impressive villainy resume to get themselves to an advantageous position to backstab the baddie.

Of these three, the first two to me are a little… "Eh…" They're good for what they are and they do a good job of making your audience suffer, especially if they were rooting for that character to be redeemed. Hey, they managed to do that with Zuko, too. Thought that show was good. They're basically knife-twisting. You wanted the character to be good and they weren't, or maybe you didn't trust the character and you hate to be proven right. Bonus points if either of those sentiments were held by an actual protagonist.

But the third one is by far my personal favorite, because if you play your cards right, you can get all the advantages of the first two, plus some serious quality banter between the heroes when the ruse is revealed and at the climactic turning point, a potentially awesome reveal of the "bad guy's" true loyalties.

The difficulty here is convincing the audience that you're going for options one or two so that the true reveal is sufficiently revelatory. Usually, this means having your-totally-a-bad-guy-again do something suitably nasty, like torturing or killing someone or just beating the tar out of one of their friends, which is done to almost humorous effects in Dragon Ball.

During the Buu arc, when Vegeta gets "taken over" by Babidi's evil magic and becomes Majin Vegeta. This briefly looks like he's been possessed but it turns out he willingly took the evil power, because he thinks that pure evilness is the only thing that makes him stronger than Goku. It is kind of him briefly turning evil again before he gets over himself, but Goku does not believe that Vegeta is evil. To convince Goku that he's serious, he vaporizes half the stadium, taking out a good chunk of onlookers. Evil, right? But this is Dragon Ball. Literally the same day after he kills himself, the group summons Shenron and brought back everyone not evil that had been killed, including everyone Vegeta wiped out during his little power trip.

It was a major "Oh, snap!" moment right up until everyone remembered what show they're watching. But it did work, because even though it was a solvable problem, Vegeta hadn't murdered anyone innocent in seven seasons, so it was kind of a big deal.

Anyway, bottom line, villain redemption is complicated and a bit of a minefield, but potentially very rewarding if you play with it.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.


	2. The Hero's Journey

Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!

'The Hero's Journey' as a codified concept was initially coined by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces". After examining a large number of stories and myths from various cultures around the world, Campbell analysed the common threads he recognized and came to the conclusion that he had identified the fundamental components of an archetypal hero's journey.

The idea is that this formula, this 'monomyth' as he confidently calls it, covers everything from Gilgamesh to the Buddha, all the way up to modern day and can be identified in a large number of stories in-between. Now while it's cool that so many stories have shared common threads- (Which you may note, is the definition of a trope in the first place) -Campbell went a little overboard on trying to apply the rule to absolutely EVERYTHING in assert that it was the only way hero stories can be told. But, of course, no trope is omnipotent, and it's impossible to come to one formula for how all stories since forever have been written.

For our purposes, let's take a less cavalier approach. 'The Hero's Journey' is not a trope that all stories do or should follow as a strict formula, but rather the trope works best when it serves as a lens through which to view and analyse a story.

Think of it as a more detailed version of a three-act structure. There's no mandate that anyone has to write that way, but knowing about it and understanding how it works lets you analyse the story from this perspective and potentially identify interesting story components you might have otherwise overlooked. And also, like all lenses, you need to make sure that you're not using it to view stuff that doesn't fit.

Not all stories are hero's journeys, and in some cases, looking at a story through the lens of a hero's journey will obscure your view of the parts of the story that don't easily fall into its categories. Trope responsibly, folks!

So before the hero's journey was the thing that all the cool heroes are allegedly doing, the term for the general 'leave the ordinary world to have an adventure' myth was 'the Medicine Journey'. A concept observed in worldwide examples of shamanism by University of Chicago professor, Mircea Eliade, who wrote a few books on the subject. The medicine journey serves as a structural foundation of the hero's journey, with all the other bits basically added in by Campbell for specificity later.

The basic structure of the medicine journey is the following:

A problem exists for which there is no solution within our ordinary understanding of the world. (Like our starting culture)

So, the protagonist must travel elsewhere to find the solution.

And eventually, they return with the solution to the problem!

For instance, the Journey to the West is a medicine journey where the problem is evil and suffering and the solution is Enlightenment. The West being the 'elsewhere' Tripitaka and friends have to travel to.

So the hero's journey heavily reflects that original structure of leave, find solution, come back. So Campbell's trope takes the three-part structure of:

Departure- Where the hero leaves the familiar world.

Initiation- Where the hero navigates the unfamiliar world, otherwise known as 'the world of adventure'.

Return- Where the hero, well, returns to the familiar world.

Usually bringing along the stuff they went to the unfamiliar world for in the first place. Otherwise, you'll...have a problem. Campbell's first major alteration to this trope was to install 'the hero' archetype as the protagonist. The medicine journey could have any type of protagonist whatsoever with literally zero caveats. It could be a group, a child, a squishy human monk with his four monster friends, you name it! By contrast, 'hero' is a much narrower characterisation and it comes with a decent amount of narrative baggage too. So we can already see how Campbell was starting to narrow it in here.

From there, Campbell developed a highly specific and detailed model of the fundamental hero's journey. Adding a large number of secondary story elements he observed frequently augmenting the general medicine journey structure. He was also using it to try and make sweeping assessments of humanity as a whole (which is never a good sign in literary analysis).

The problem is that the trope as he outlined it, was way too specific and didn't really apply to all that many things. So as a result, it isn't all that useful, even as an analytical tool. Unless you're willing to flagrantly abuse and squish around the text you're trying to analyze to fit it exactly. (Which, I highly advise against.)

So since then, a lot of people have made their own versions of the model, to the point where no two sources of it will fully agree with one another. Stripping away a lot of the faff to make it more inclusive and more useful to understand. The general rule of thumb nowadays, is that a lot of stories fit some of the components of the hero's journey. But it's meant to be flexible and there shouldn't be pressure to force a story to fit it. Again, it's not a recipe, it's there to help us understand story structure.

A lot of writers have serious beef with this trope when taken as a mandate because their critics tell them their story needs to fit the hero's journey. Which is as needlessly annoying as any "Oh man, you got to do this trope!" complaint. So we got to tread carefully.

Alright, so with the origins and several disclaimers out of the way, here is the modern consensus of what approximately a hero's journey looks like.

Stage 1 is the Ordinary World. This is the hero's starting point. It's usually familiar to the audience and is definitely familiar to the hero. The purpose of the ordinary world is to give us a 'status quo' to start from, and to get your audience personally invested in the comfort the ordinary world provides so the impact of leaving is strengthened later on. As an optional bonus, your hero can be comfortable with their life here, but really yearning for something more, foreshadowing the inevitable onset of the plot.

Next, they get the Call to Adventure, where the hero learns they might need to do something out of the ordinary in order to save their familiar world. This stage is sometimes accompanied by a mentor character, your Gandalfs and Obi-Wans. But sometimes, they show up later to guide the hero through the unfamiliar world instead. This part is identifiable in the original medicine journey structure as the moment your protagonist realises there's a problem that they can't solve internally.

The next step, the Refusal of the Call, is where the hero doesn't want to go on an adventure, and is narratively punished for this. Typically, their ordinary world is damaged in some way as a result of their refusal to act, so the hero then recognizes that they need to go on the journey, even if it's still semi-reluctant. If you have a gruff but fair father figure in your ordinary world, the narrative punishment is usually this dude getting Uncle Ben'd. The refusal is actually semi-optional even in this structure, because sometimes, heroes are all about adventure and jump at the opportunity instead. Again, it's flexible.

Stage Four is when the hero 'Crosses the First Threshold' into the unfamiliar world, and the story really gets going! Here, the hero makes a conscious and irreversible decision to go on the adventure and crosses through some physical threshold that signifies that. Sometimes there are threshold guardians to test the hero, but that's optional. If you're dealing with something like an urban fantasy where the natural world is the world of adventure, the first threshold is usually where the hero gains the power to see the more adventurous underside of the ordinary world, or is introduced to the secret world and has the urban fantasy rules explained to them.

In the next step, the Realm of Adventure, the hero learns how to navigate a world totally different from the ordinary world they started in. Sometimes, this involves nifty loot, friends and allies, convenient mentors, etc. This is usually a very large portion of the story because it's fun and that's what we're all here for! Also sometimes, this part of the story has the hero find or at least figure out the solution to the initial problem that they're here to solve, making the problem getting the solution back to the ordinary world.

Okay, so this next stage is often the most misunderstood. In a lot of cases, it's shoehorned in right before or even during the final fight with the Big Bad, which really doesn't do it justice. This section is usually called the 'Belly of the Whale', named after that very moment in the story of Jonah. It's where the hero descends into an abyss or in one way or another 'goes down' and undergoes a psychological trial during their darkest hour. In the classical Greek and Roman tradition, this part of the story is known as the 'Kathabasis'. Literally 'going down' and usually constitutes a trip to the Underworld. Here, the physical symbolism of descent is meant to clue the reader in to what's going on thematically inside the hero's head. Anyway, here, the hero has to face and overcome their inner demons, and they emerge as a stronger and better person for it. Now to be clear, the hero doesn't need to be in any physical danger for this portion of the story to be effective. And it can be even more effective when the danger is explicitly coming from inside the hero instead. It's essentially the mental internal climax of the story, and it prepares the hero for the trials to come. Sometimes this is phrased as rebirth, since the hero is different when they emerge from the whale. (But I personally find that this implies too much of a physical component, which just gets confusing…) The key purpose of this stage is that the hero undergoes character development. In any case, this is a major turning point in a hero's journey and usually marks the point where the hero is fully committed to the adventure and prepared for the dangers ahead.

Stage Seven is the Road of Trials, the path out of the belly of the whale. Usually this part coincides with the appearance of a lot of tests, allies and enemies. This usually includes a temptation to 'leave your quest' test where the hero is tempted to abandon their journey. Campbell's version calls this 'the woman as temptress' and gives it an entire section and since that notion is more than a little antiquated, most people agree that any form of temptation, be it money, power, lust, or even just a good night's sleep will do the trick. The road of trials is also frequently a large part of the story because again, it's fun! And it's also really cool because since the hero has escaped the abyss, you get to see your hero as a full hero with their act together now! Stages 5 through 7 can be seen as one contiguous act, since it's usually quite long and makes up most of the meat of the actual adventuring. Your hero's have wacky trials in Adventureland! What more do you need?

The next stage is the Pre-Showdown Breather, where you're coming up on the final confrontation against the physical or metaphorical Big Bad, so your hero or heroes take a quiet moment to reminisce. This one is also optional because sometimes you just straight-up don't get that minute to breathe. Such is life. This gives the writer the chance to show off the humanity of the characters involved, which actually exposes some of the difficulties caused by the hero's journey. Since, ideally, you don't need a designated chapter to remind your readers that these characters are fully developed characters. Usually you want that to be on full display for most of the story, but the hero's journey is a plot driven structure which can easily supersede the unique characterization of the characters involved.

The next stage is the Climax of the story, and there are three ways to tackle it. The Final Showdown, the Apotheosis, and the Ultimate Boon. And most stories will put two or more of these together in some capacity because that just gives you more options. The most standard version of this is the Final Showdown, where the hero fights an overwhelmingly powerful enemy and the hero then defeats the Big Bad, frequently through some form of self-sacrifice. In the Apotheosis, which is Greek for 'the elevation to godhood', the hero comes to view the world in a radically different way due to some revelation or received knowledge. Either that or they get a new power. Finally, there's the Ultimate Boon, where the hero attains their final reward, which they have been seeking all along. Sometimes, there's a final temptation to overcome, but again, that's optional. In a lot of our media today, the climax to an adventure story almost always includes some big fight, but there are a lot of ways to go about writing a narrative climax that get brushed aside because honestly, they're just more difficult and people are lazy. But their rarity makes reading a good non-fight climax more rewarding. What kind of climax your story ultimately has depends in large part on what kind of story you're trying to tell and what you want your readers to see as valuable. Whether that's a heightened knowledge of the world, victory over the forces of evil, or some gift that will make the ordinary world a better place, is all up to you.

After the Climax, we get stages 10 through 12, which all happen in fairly quick succession. The first of which is The Return, where the hero's all done with the adventure and needs to start heading home. This can be a high-octane chase or a slow, sedate and contemplative journey back. Next, the hero Crosses the Return Threshold, and makes it back into the ordinary world. Lastly, there's the Final Reward, the hero's happy ending. Here, the hero is back in the ordinary world, and not only is the hero a stronger and better person from their journey, but the world itself has usually been improved in some way as well. This sometimes gets coded as the hero returning with an elixir, which of course is taken directly from the medicine journey. Where this is the part where the protagonists return to the world with the solution to the problem that sent them on the journey in the first place.

So, that's pretty much the Hero's Journey. And while I doubt that there are too many stories that tick all the checkboxes, I'm sure you recognized a few of these stages from at least a handful of stories. It's not a one-size-fits-all guide to how to write the perfect story, because if you wrote a story that exactly follows this, it would feel ridiculously generic. But there are a lot of useful components to be found here, if we look at the stages in isolation.

For example, the Ordinary World is super useful because it establishes a comfortable status quo that your audience and hero will want to return to. When that world is threatened, you can discuss the visceral discomfort of a disrupted status quo and a story that takes place in that zone of discomfort will be by necessity, uncomfortable by your audience, who will be waiting with bated breath for things to be fixed! Also because you establish it as comfortable and familiar for your hero, your audience will potentially empathise with this and feel similarly driven to protect it when it comes under fire.

The Refusal of the Call is useful because it addresses the fact that most adventures ARE dangerous and scary! See, most real-life endeavors or adventures like activism, public performance or just anything where it feels like you have stuff to lose are frequently undesirable until and unless they become highly personal to the active party. So the feeling of being pulled between the desire to do the right thing and the fear of possible consequences is relatable for most of your audience. Overall, the stage establishes that your character isn't just a vehicle for the plot and isn't necessarily a willing participant in your story. But note the stages aren't always necessary and can sometimes feel like a disingenuous token protest. And "Oh, I couldn't possibly…" from the hero before the plot really gets going.

The Realm of Adventure has one major thing going for it: It's different! That's a very useful starting point! And because you establish that your hero starts in a familiar Ordinary World, you can show off this new, fancy world to your audience as much as you like, since they'll be just as clueless about it as your heroes will be. You can display your world building for all to see, which is convenient if you're a specially enthusiastic world builder. This works as a contrast with the ordinary world and can't function without it. Since without the Ordinary World, the Realm of Adventure is just...a world. Establishing its difference from the norm lets you explore it fully without this feeling like a contrived info dump.

The Belly of the Whale is interesting because challenging your heroes is good. Doing that physically is fine, but challenging them mentally is frequently more interesting, usually because it has a more uncertain outcome. From a meta perspective, most heroes can't really afford to lose a physical fight, if death's a possible outcome. But your heroes can absolutely fail a mental trial. The only consequences are their mental health and personal well-being! *cough-cough* Ahem, sorry… Got caught in the moment. But that means angst, angst, ANGST, as well as tons of opportunities for character development. Your hero finally emerges from the Belly of the Whale when they finally succeeded in their mental tasks. But this doesn't necessarily have to be easy or quick and they can even have adventures when they're still super messed up. Sometimes, the Belly of the Whale is more of a state of mind than a physical location.

The Pre-Showdown Banter lets your heroes chill a bit, which is good because we always have to remember that these characters are human. Again, it's easy to get caught up in the story you want to tell on the adventure you want to write, but if it's nonstop action, your characters and your audience will get exhausted. Pacing is super important! Let your heroes take a minute to recuperate, let your audience hit the bathrooms, or take a nap, or something… All emphasis is no emphasis. The high octane adventurer loses its impact if you never have the slow subtle stages. It also doesn't really have to happen right before the big showdown. Breathers can honestly happen almost anywhere. This whole thing is more of a structural reminder that pacing really matters.

For the Return/Final Reward, your adventure ends eventually and while not all stories end back where they started, there's a melancholic victory in doing it that way. Your hero's home, but is it home anymore? Consider the ending of the Lord of the Rings. They return to the Shire, but they can never go back to who they were before the adventure. For Merry and Pippin, that's good. They're stronger, taller, more badass. For Sam, he's braver and can properly get his reward of raising a family. But for Frodo, the Shire can never be his home again. He can only get the rest he deserves by leaving Middle Earth entirely, because… you can't always go home again… It's a good way to give your story a bittersweet ending as well as explore what an ending should be like. Also, does their story NEED to end? Maybe it's only the first of many adventures! Maybe even though they finished the adventure, they now know they can't sit idly by when something goes wrong. Maybe when they return, the adventure continues! 'The End' doesn't have to be the end.

And for something extra to think about, the 'hero' is a vague archetype but it still has fairly rigid components. When really, the hero of the story can be almost anyone. Campbell implies a strict hero character, but really the only trait that the hero needs in the structure is that they're usually naive when it comes to the unfamiliar world, which is reasonable. Look no further than Overly Sarcastic Productions' Trope Talk videos or any further trope talk sections I might do to see much, much more about how you can really play with your hero character!

So, there's really nothing wrong with this trope intrinsically as it helps us understand a multitude of excellent stories from all over the world, but it shouldn't GUIDE your writing on its own. It's similar to the Rule of Three (which I'll cover another time), in that it's more of a recurring concept than a trope people deliberately invoke. But in another similar vein to the Rule of Three, people tend to think it's more structurally vital than it really needs to be.

You can write an excellent hero story without needing to use the hero's journey model. Just look at Captain America, which has exactly ZERO elements of the classic hero's journey. Tellingly, most modern versions of this model explicitly state that any number of component parts can and usually are excluded from the final product. Which is great, because with this (metaphorical) generator that we hooked to Campbell's grave, we can power the entire Eastern Seaboard with how fast he's spinning!

Ultimately, it's good to be aware of it, and there's a lot of useful stuff included in it. Plus, once you know how to look for it, much like the Rule of Three, it is everywhere! But it doesn't dictate how you HAVE to write and it's nowhere near universal. So don't do anything for the sake of just doing it, do it if it helps you tell YOUR story.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.


	3. Classic JRPG Party

Note: This post is inspired by a video not from Overly Sarcastic Productions, but one from a YouTuber named Liam Carter. I still recommend watching it, though.

Hello, fellow fanfic nuts. My name is David Ishihara. You may know me as the leader of the Brave Adventurers in the Dimensional Heroes series, and believe it or not, I'm a huge JRPG fan, to the point where the basic structure of my group is assembled like a JRPG party. Especially since I've been playing JRPGs for as long as I can remember, but it's easily one of my favorite genres, due to the dynamics that were made throughout the team and everyone around them.

And while I'm not exactly an expert on the genre by any means, I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the recurring tropes I've seen crop up from everything I've seen from them. Basically, I wanted to talk about the classic JRPG party. More specifically, the types of characters seen in them, and how they affect the party as a whole.

Now when I say classic, I mean a Classic-style JRPG, with a vast world to explore, huge cast of characters, and a deep and involving story. Examples like Final Fantasy, Tales of, Star Ocean, Dragon Quest and the like. Throughout my fanaticism, I've noticed that you'll find at least one, if not all, of these specific character roles in the playable party.

These roles are identified as the Main Protagonist, Secondary Protagonist, Best Friend Character, Old Character, Child Character, and Non-Human/Different Race Character. Now to be clear, I haven't played/watched a playthrough of every JRPG is existence, nor do I intend to. This is not a comprehensive analysis of every playable character in every JRPG ever. As such, you'll hear me use the word 'usually' a lot. I won't be making any definitive statements about all of JRPGs, just a few observations. I'm also not the first person to make these observations, but damn it, I'm gonna be the first person on this site to make a post about it! We good? Cool.

To start off, I want to make special note of my use of the word character 'roles', and not something like archetypes or personalities. A character's role within the context of the party, and by extension the story, is really independent of the character's personality.

A main protagonist can either be angsty and melodramatic or cheerful and down to earth. They're still pretty much always gonna be the main protagonist. This also pretty much applies to every character in your party. Their roles and their personalities are seperate. Secondly, I'd like to take a guess as to why we see this combination of character roles so frequently. Obviously I don't have a lot of insider information on the games that invoke these combinations of character roles, but my main guess would be that a strong balance of character perspectives makes for a more interesting and dynamic party.

If all of your characters are teenagers, you'll be a bit restrictive in your writing in some way if you want it to be believable. You'll have to rate your characters as, well, teenagers, whatever you may define that as. Having an array of ages and races in your party is going to provide you with the most freedom when it comes to writing character perspectives and motivations. I personally don't think it's a stretch to say that people of vastly different ages and races will tend to look at the world differently in some ways. So, without further ado, let's break down these character roles.

First, we have the Main Protagonist. This is usually a male between ages 17 and 21. They most likely use a sword or a sort of variation of a sword for combat, they have strong morals, and are usually different from the rest of the party in some key way. For example, they might be the Chosen One, have a special ability, be the result of some kind of science experiment, have a unique upbringing, etc. Usually, they're portrayed as an average person that is somewhat ignorant to the world around them.

Next we have the Secondary Protagonist, or Deuteragonist if you want to get nitpicky. Usually a female in the same age range as the protagonist, and more often than not, a love interest. While the secondary protagonist is usually opposite in terms of personality to the main protagonist, they often share the same strong morals. They're often highborn or privileged in some way, be they of royal blood, wealthy background, or some kind of religious figure. It's usually the case in most fantasy-inspired settings that either the main protagonist or the secondary protagonist be the Chosen One, or have some unique role to play in that world. It's almost never the case that either both or neither are this way. This is so the two characters can be written in contrast to one another. One of them plays the role of the everyman and the other plays the role of the upper class. This isn't something unique to JRPGs by any means, but it is something you see in them quite often.

Moving right along, next is the Best Friend Character. Usually the same gender and age range as the main protagonist and usually has known them since childhood or at the very least at the beginning of their journey. They usually act as a foil to the main character in terms of personality and in some cases, as a younger or older sibling type character.

Next, we have the Old Character, which is a terrible title for a character, but please bear with me. The Old Character is usually male and is, as the name suggests, the oldest member of your party. How much older they are compared to everyone else can vary wildly. It's usually about 10-15 years older than the main protagonist, but in some cases, it can be as much as 40-50 years older than everyone else. They usually take part in some prior events that lead up to the main story of the game and are often some high-ranking official or famous individual in that game's world. The Old Character almost always takes up some kind of parental role within the party, and acts as a source of wisdom.

Up next, we have the complete opposite of the Old Character in the Child Character. While the gender of the child character varies, they're pretty much always in the 12-14 range. The child character usually provides some kind of perspective to the party that they wouldn't have had otherwise. Either through their backstory or some kind of specialized knowledge that they have. Unsurprisingly, they also often take the role of a younger sibling, either to the main character or some other party member.

And last but not least, we have the Non-Human Character. This is a role that I think has the most variation among JRPGs, as it allows the creation of a character that really is supposed to exist outside the rest of the cast, and by extension, the rest of the people in that world. Their gender varies across games, sometimes not having a defined gender at all, and their age varies greatly as well, sometimes being considered young by the standards of their own race, but old when compared to everyone else in the party. The personality of the non-human character can also vary greatly from game to game. But one thing that's usually for certain is that they often act in a way the other party members find strange, further emphasizing the fact they're different from everyone else. This of course is also relative. Strange to the rest of the party may be perfectly normal to their race. The non-human character has often been ostracized from their society or at the very least is seen as an oddball amongst their kin. If it's neither of those, it's not uncommon for them to be the last one or one of the last of their race, which has either been wiped out mostly or completely. It should also be worth noting that while it is rare, there are sometimes instances where the non-human characters in the party are simply animals that inhabit the world of that game. Their only real defining feature is that they usually have very high intelligence for an animal, and probably use a weapon of some sort.

Even though I've only gone into depth on six of these character roles, because they're found to be the most prevalent, there are other kinds of character archetypes that are commonplace in JRPGs, yet just don't have enough complexity to be considered party roles on their own. I say that because they're more like add-ons to a character rather than a defining feature.

To name a few of these archetypes, there's the Peeping Tom, Fanservice Character, Hot Head, Oddball, Rogue, Sheltered Royal, Tsundere, Rival, Mascot Character, Perky Teen, Tortured Soul, and so on and so forth. These sub-archetypes help to distinguish two characters that may serve the same role in the greater party context. This becomes valuable in games that have a very large playable character roster.

It's also important to know that a single character can have many hats when it comes to the role in the party. For example, it's not uncommon for the secondary protagonist to also be the best friend, or for the best friend to also be the rival, similarly the child can also be the best friend, and the mascot is almost always the non-human character.

Again, like the Hero's Journey, this isn't a one-size-fits-all guide to how the perfect JRPG party should be made. But I'm willing to bet that you'll find a lot of these characters in almost every JRPG.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, these are just observations that were made while looking at JRPGs over the years. There are certain series and games that I haven't mentioned during this post that either completely confirm or contradict what I laid out in this post, and that's fine. I'm not trying to make a definitive statement about the genre. Some of my absolute favorite games fall right into these tropes, and I love them all the same. Remember, just because someone is making an observation or a critique about a thing you like, doesn't mean it's any less valuable to YOU. Only you can dictate the worth of something.

Thank you so much for listening. I had a lot of fun making this post. If you had a lot of fun reading it and would like to make a request, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.


	4. Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass

Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!

Stop me if you heard this one before. Ahem! Everyone say hello to our new protagonist! They're such a goofball that you gotta wonder if they even know where they are half the time. They're so silly and yet their stupidity is strangely endearing. But oh no! Plot is happening around them and something dangerous is threatening our idiot hero. How on earth will they cope? But wait, what's this? Our idiot hero seems to be much less of an idiot now than they were a second ago. How are they beating this guy so effortlessly? What just happened?!

Congratulations! You've just met the Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, a popular character across all genres of literature who's pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. This character looks and acts like an idiot, but just below the goofy surface is a Grade-A badass just waiting for a chance to be underestimated and show off how confident they really are. Now, there are several subtypes of CMHBs. While they share the key characteristic of being perceived as a goofball while being capable of being a badass, the way that internally manifests varies from archetype to archetype.

For example, let's look at the Faker CMHB, the character who is a stone-cold badass, but puts up a veneer of wackiness, usually either to throw people off their guard or just because they genuinely like being silly and to a certain extent, they prefer to just pretend they're a lovable goof instead of a terrifyingly competent murder machine. The Faker archetype frequently comes with a dark and troubled past to explain why they're so averse to being openly badass but are still willing to bust out the old moves when the situation gets dire enough, but sometimes they're just goofing off in their downtime. Also, sometimes the faker is an old mentor type who plays up the retired old person angle to get themselves underestimated then bust out some surprise ability when the going gets tough.

A step more extreme than the faker is the split personality CMHB archetype, where the character's moron and badass personalities are literally separate people. The badass half has a tendency to stay dormant unless absolutely necessary, but will often make dramatic appearances when the moron half is out of their depth. Frequently, the moron half won't know the badass half exists, at least at the start. Also, this variant shows up as a brain-damaged anime girl with amnesia a solid 90% of the time. I don't know why that is, and I kinda don't want to know. This is the laziest version of this trope, honestly. Rather than develop a multi-faceted character, it takes an utterly useless character and sticks them in the same body as a competent but generic and frequently kind of evil character and has them switch places as the plot demands. This gives you two uninteresting characters instead of one interesting character.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Manchild variant, which is almost the ultimate fusion of the CMHB. This character is at all times capable of being both a moron and a badass. They're a goofball, but that doesn't impede their competence at whatever it is they're good at. They're a badass, but that doesn't stop them from goofing around or not taking things seriously. Rather than switching between two distinct modes where they're either serious or silly with no overlap, the manchild almost never drops the silliness completely and will instead dial it back gradually as necessary. The manchild is extremely sincere and often quite self-aware of their silliness, but not always. On the far more end of the bell curve, this character is more like a generalized idiot who's surprisingly good at a select few things and outside of those things, will be barely functional.

This contrasts with a similar variant called the Zero-Confidence Goofball CMHB. This character is pretty much unaware of their badassery. They know they're a goofball and they frequently have hang-ups about being so ridiculous and messing things up, but without them realizing it, they're actually very capable in at least one skill set. The Zero-Confidence Goofball shares traits with the Manchild in that they seamlessly blend their silliness in their seriousness, but in this case, it's usually because they don't fully process that they're doing anything exceptionally badass. Usually, when it's pointed out to them, they first dismiss it as just a normal thing and then get very excited. The Zero-Confidence Goofball can be relied on to be very competent and badass when the situation is dire and will usually have a character arc centered on gaining some self-confidence.

A fairly specialized variant is the Shonen Protagonist, or the Goku if you want to be overt. See, most Shonen heroes are based on Goku in one way or another, which means on average, they care only about three things: food, fighting, and friendship. And most of the time, these guys are really goofy when they're not doing the fighting thing, but when they get pissed, usually as the result of one of their friends being threatened or hurt, they kick into Serious Mode and start single-mindedly trying to fight whoever is responsible. They are a simple folk. They are morons until circumstances persuade them to be badasses. These characters often develop an in-universe reputation for ludicrous powers, they ass-kick their way through the seasons, but that never seems to stop people from underestimating them when they meet face to face and find out that this walking talking force of nature thinks marriage is something you eat. Ugh… I am not gonna go there. Generally, the Shonen Protagonist is a bonafide idiot who happens to make up for their brain deficiency by being ludicrously talented at kicking ass, so whenever the situation develops into a good old-fashioned punch up, they get their chance to shine.

An even more specialized variant is the Second Fiddle, which is more of a quirk of how protagonist group dynamics form. See, in a lot of group-oriented shows with like a Five-Man Band as a focus (which I might cover another time), the main hero will be a super badass and their Lancer might be slightly less powerful than them, but still serve as a rival. In cases where this rivalry is played for comedy, the Lancer will lose every time they clash with the leader and it'll be funny every time. What this means is that you have a character who's only required to lose when they fight the hero, but is objectively very powerful on their own as they're Second Fiddle to the Best of the Best. But we're only reminded of that power when they're allowed to fight someone who isn't the main hero. So in a group dynamic, the Second Fiddle will play up the comedy factor, but in a solo combat situation, they'll be allowed to show off their badassery.

The CMHB is one of my favorite character tropes, but it's not exactly a personal preference. CMHBs are tailor-made to do two things: be funny and be awesome. And guess what? People like funnies and people like awesome and I'm people. The CMHB is the perfect storm of humor and "Hell Yeah!", or at least, they are when they're well-written. The CMHB is ideally designed so that at all times, they provoke one of two responses: "Heh, that's funny." or "Aw, that's awesome!" They're an attempt to get the best of two worlds: comic relief and awesome badass, without having to deal too much with character complexities or other frustrations.

See, purely Comic Relief characters have one glaring problem. By their nature, they are useless to the plot. They're just there to punctuate the plot by cheering up the audience. So a lot of comic relief characters will have their personalities supplemented by traits that help them function in a plot relevant situation. Oddly, making them snipers is strangely common, so is making them hackers.

The CMHB is a highly polished version of this. It takes a comic relief character and makes them competent. Antagonists expect comic relief and are blindsided by badassery. Ideally, the CMHB retains the audience cheering properties of the comic relief as well as the awesome heroics of the badass and even gains equality outside the sum of its parts by hitting the audience with surprise heroics. We expect badassery from the resident badass. When it comes from the comic relief, we're pleasantly surprised.

In its perfect form, the CMHB is a whole character with benefits greater than the sum of its archetypes. However, this only works when the CMHB doesn't come off as annoying to the audience and there's a lot of ways to screw that up.

For one, a major trade of the CMHB is that they're chronically underestimated. If they're not being seen as a moron, then the moment when they pull out the badassery loses impact. So in general, anyone about to get whacked with the badass side is only expecting to see the moron side. But sometimes you run into the issue where the CMHB is badass so regularly and so visibly that it makes no sense for anyone to underestimate them anymore. It can disengage an audience if every single one of your antagonists comes across as a total idiot for writing off your ridiculously badass hero as just another goofball.

An audience can also suffer from badass fatigue. Sometimes when your CMHB pulls out the badass for the first time, it's played like a big character reveal, shocking the other characters along with the audience. But after that, sometimes writers will abandon the previously demonstrated moron/badass economy in favor of keeping the character badass in perpetuity. This character isn't really a CMHB, they're just a badass who had a weird gimmick when they first showed up. Since they lose the comedic moron side to be a perma-badass, they lose the "Ha, that's funny." and the "Aw, that's awesome!" impacts since the character isn't funny and their badassery isn't surprising. The character loses the benefits gained by being occasional comic relief. When a character is only ever allowed to do one thing, even if that one thing is be a badass, the audience is liable to get bored. Badass fatigue, know the symptoms.

And sometimes, the moron and badass sides of the character just don't seem balanced. Frequently for example, the moron persona is just really annoying or useless and actively gets into unnecessary trouble that it really seems like the badass persona wouldn't allow. This is most commonly an issue with the split-personality CMHBs but can show up with any version if the character's goofiness becomes actively disruptive. At which point, instead of reaping the benefits of a multi-faceted character, the audience treats one side of the character as a disruption to the other. Hard to find the moron half funny if they're just cluttering up the plot for the badass half to clean up later.

In its most extreme form, this turns into a whole problem of its own when the moron and badass sides are in direct conflict. See, moron shenanigans are only funny so long as they aren't disruptive. If you have a CMHB who's supposed to be a single coherent character, but something they do in Moron Mode actively causes problems that it seems like Badass Mode shouldn't have let happen, that becomes disruptive. If the moron and the badass sides of the character don't fit together, then why put them in the same character in the first place? Consider a CMHB in a dangerous combat situation who goofs around and ends up getting someone injured. In this case, the moron-atude actively clashes with the badassery. From a writing angle, the badass side shouldn't have allowed someone to get hurt, so the moron-atude starts feeling annoyingly irresponsible and out of character rather than funny. Ideally, you don't want your audience to go "Ugh… This again…" every time your CMHB starts to goof off. Then again, sometimes the character's moron traits fit perfectly with their badass traits and are still frustrating to the audience.

Classic example, Dragon Ball Z's Saiyans are all complete idiots when it comes to fighting, since they care more about fighting strong opponents than they do about actually efficiently stopping them from doing evil stuff. Goku and Vegeta both notoriously let their enemies get as strong as they possibly can in order to get a good fight and it's just as frustratingly stupid every time. But it's frustratingly stupid and in-character, so it's totally fine from a writing angle. Hell, if anything, it makes the character more convincingly a moron.

See, sometimes when writing a CMHB, the character can come across as really not that much of a moron at all. They'll mess around when things are chill, but they'll never do anything actively problematic and will handle every crisis that comes their way with customary levels of badassery. Basically, they're funny, but they're not stupid, and this is fine. But you can also get comedy from characters who really do stupid stuff despite being badass. Their moron-atude isn't just decorative, it's true to their character and can actually cause problems. Brooklyn Nine-Nine's classic Manchild Jake Peralta is comically terrible at being an adult or following the rules, but he's an amazing detective. But his loose-cannoning and disdain for protocol have actually gotten him in trouble beyond just pissing off authority figures when his actions have unforeseen consequences. While these storylines can be annoying to the audience if his stupidity involved seems out of character, Jake is established at being terrible at thinking through consequences, so it totally fits for him to screw up on occasion and it makes him more interesting than if his wacky stupidity was just restricted to office pranks and cute one-liners. He's a flawed character, and that makes him more interesting than if he were a totally unproblematic Golden Boy.

Broadly, the greatest strength of the CMHB is that it avoids the primary pitfalls faced by comic relief characters and stone-cold badasses. Comic relief can get insufferable with overexposure or just feel situationally inappropriate when the going gets rough. Or worst of all, wind up obnoxiously useless in high-stakes situations, cluttering up the drama with half-assed one-liners and getting in the way of more serious characters. On the other side, stone-cold badasses can often wind up stuck as non-entities outside of dangerous or dramatic situations. If they're not kicking ass, the writer doesn't know what to do with them. By writing a CMHB, or at least writing one well, you end up with a character who has a charming and funny personality outside of danger and is more than capable of pulling their weight when in danger. A CMHB also has the potential to have a lot of emotional impact on your audience.

Now a pure comic relief character can usually only make the audience laugh or if they wind up in a situation so bad they can't or won't be funny, they can sometimes give the audience an "oh, no!" reaction, since their uncharacteristic carelessness communicates that this situation is really bad and/or sad as it's managed to knock the fun out of character made of fun. A pure badass character can also produce the "oh, no!" response in dangerous enough situations, but they're mostly designed to get the "oh, yeah!" reaction when they do something exceptionally cool. The CMHB can readily produce all three reactions. When they're funny, they get a laugh. When they're cool, they get an "oh, yeah!" and when they're truly deeply upset, they can readily get an "oh, no!"

A well known example of this is Justice League Unlimited's Flash, who in the climax of his most memorable arc, manages to produce all three reactions in rapid succession. Throughout the show, The Flash has shown himself to be a classic lovable goofball and the designated funny man in a team full of generally stoic badasses and he's a solidly written Manchild CMHB and that his humor never compromises his ability to save the day. He's also very clearly the emotional heart of the team, which is touched on in detail in an early episode of the show where the team finds an alternate universe where The Flash had been killed several years prior by President Lex Luthor and the League could go on full dictator as a result, starting with Superman killing Luthor in the Oval Office before going on to take over the world. At the time, Flash even quips about how this proves he's the heart and conscience of the team and they should probably put all their focus on keeping him alive. It's a joke, but it's also kind of not a joke. This also comes back to focus in Season 4, when Luthor decides to start screwing with Superman by hinting that he's trying to recreate the circumstances in that other universe that drove Superman to abandon his morals and full-on kill him. Step 1 is become President, step 2 is kill The Flash, step 3 is get murdered. Stellar plan, Lex. Flash even cracks a couple jokes about it and tells the team that clearly the number one way to foil Lex's evil plan is to make sure to keep him alive at all costs. Obviously, superhero nonsense happens to complicate things and in the finale, Luthor ends up fusing with Brainiac into a big scary robot man with Braniac's ludicrous power and Luthor's flair for the dramatic. During the fight, we get a few funny Flash moments, because that's just kind of how he talks most of the time, but after KO'ing the League and a big explosion, Luthor decides he may as well kill The Flash while he's got a minute to spare, and Flash, for the first time in the show, seems scared. This is an "oh, no!" moment for the audience and signals that this bombastic superhero season finale has taken a turn for the intense. Flash has been in danger before, obviously it is a superhero show, but he's never been this alone and frightened before. Since he's normally such a ray of sunshine or at least snarky when in distress, seeing his character devoid of wackiness is an audience gut punch. Zero attempts at comedy means he's completely freaked out. The "oh, no!" intensifies when Flash manages to break out of Luthor's grip but when Lex condescendingly asks him if he's really gonna fight him alone, Flash hesitates then wordlessly turns and runs away. No sass, no one-liner, just running for his life. But this "oh, no!" moment turns into an "oh, yeah!" when Flash reappears on the horizon and blindsides Luthor really hard, having run around the world first to build up speed. He then does this like six more times, culminating in him liberating Luthor and Brainiac apart molecule by molecule while moving faster than we've ever seen him go before. This is probably the coolest thing he does in the show, in no small part because he's so completely unfunny during this scene. This is pure badass, no funny, and it's awesome. But it immediately steps back to "OH, NO!" when Flash vanishes into the Speed Force from overtaxing his superpowers, and you know, obviously they pull him out and it ends happily and stuff because it's a kid's show, but this is the emotional impact a CMHB can have. You're used to the character being funny and awesome in roughly equal measure. When they're serious and awesome, you revel in the pure badassery of them going all out, but when they're serious and totally not funny, it hits you like a truck that this adaptable ray of sunshine is really freaked out and has no idea what to do. Now, obviously, this example only worked as well as it did because Flash is a really well-written CMHB, who never got annoying and was consistently written as pretty much always being at least a little wacky. He'd never really gone humorless badass before, so it had a lot of impact when he finally stopped messing around. He also didn't bounce back immediately when they pull him out of the Speed Force. He just kind of weakly says he's pretty sure he can never go that fast again and it really sells that this was a very disturbing experience that's left him quite shaken.

So CMHBs are capable of hitting the audience with a lot of emotional highs and lows as well as navigating a range of situations without feeling unnecessary. Where a pure comic relief character can be useless at a serious situation, a CMHB can be relied on to stay relevant even when the plot starts getting hairy. And where a stone-cold badass can be awkwardly out of place when the plot gets all light-hearted and fillery, the CMHB is charming even when out of danger. If you can manage to hit that sweet spot between irritatingly stupid and not really all that funny, you'll find a lot of possibilities to play around with.

But there's more you can do with the character than just slide around a dial between All Moron and All Badass. See, a lot of the core concept of the CMHB is built around this perceived dichotomy between funny and badass. The idea that you have funny scenes and awesome scenes, but never the twain shall meet and this isn't really the craziest idea in the world.

A lot of our comedy is built on people screwing up while a lot of our awesome moments are written around people succeeding spectacularly, and it's hard to make those concepts play nice. The CMHB is an attempt to play with this. It produces a character capable of wacky failures and heroic successes and keeps both sides of the character fresh by never letting either one overstay their welcome. The character fails in a funny way and succeeds in an awesome way, but these qualities are still kept separate in some key ways.

The CMHB might quip to punctuate a fight, but the actual fighting part will usually be kept serious. Even the Manchild CMHB vary entries badass in a funny way can still come across as maybe less effective a badass than they could be if they got really serious. Lots of quippy superheroes signal that they have gotten really serious by finally shutting up. The comedy intrinsic to the character is still seen as a detriment or an obstruction to the badassery.

But guys, did you know that you can have scenes that are both awesome and funny at the same time? Let's talk about Jackie Chan. Buster Keaton was a pioneer in slapstick comedy. Bruce Lee was a pioneer in martial arts cinema. Jackie Chan is what happens when a Bruce Lee-grade martial artist starts idolizing Buster Keaton and playing around with weapons-grade slapstick. What resulted was a whole bunch of movies where Jackie Chan leveraged his excellent martial arts ability to choreograph some very striking fight scenes that were really, really funny. There's a kind of physical comedy you can only really get when you're ridiculously physically skilled and you're willing to do 100 takes to get the exact impact right. The payoff is a library of highly engaging fight scenes that are yes, simultaneously funny and awesome, and that makes the character involved simultaneously funny and awesome. Comedy is not inherently built on failure, it's built on the unexpected, and it's very possible to make a character badass in consistently unexpected ways. The CMHB can, in its most extreme form, embody this perfect fusion of badassery and comedy where their characterization is almost completely static instead of switching between comedy or badassery as the situation requires.

So… How to conclude this? Broadly, the primary benefit of this character archetype is the hybridization of the most impactful qualities of its two component archetypes, but the hardest part in writing this character is striking the balance between the two without one overshadowing and disrupting the other. Its most sophisticated form, the two archetypes fully combined into the thoroughly coherent character, but that's even harder to get right than normal version of the character and I could only think of one example that ever made that work consistently.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.


	5. Tournament Arcs

Note: This document is inspired by the Trope Talk video of the same name by Overly Sarcastic Productions. I highly recommend watching that video before reading this doc. In fact, you should watch some of their other videos too. They're all great!

This may come as a surprise, but...tournament arcs are one of my favorite anime arcs.

For those of you not in the know, the Tournament Arc is an anime staple, most commonly found in Shonen anime, which is mostly anime designed to appeal to young men (and also me). Shonen anime tends to put a hefty focus on action, heroics, friendship, having to get stronger, stuff like that. Shonen anime protagonists are frequently modeled on the original Shonen hero, Son Goku, who is in turn modeled after the Monkey King himself, Sun Wukong. So the typical Shonen hero is correspondingly an impulsive goofball with ludicrous power and an admirable devotion to their friends. Dragon Ball Z is a Shonen anime, as is Naruto, Fairy Tail, Yu Yu Hakusho, My Hero Academia, Hunter X Hunter, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and a whole bunch of other shows.

Now, there's a lot of tropes associated with Shonen anime, but today, we're gonna be talking specifically about the Tournament Arc, a staple wherein our protagonists spend the better part of a season competing in a tournament. Frequently, this is a fighting tournament of some kind, but sometimes it's more specialized in non-combat, like a game tournament. The hero or heroes fight through a series of matches that amount to mini-bosses before they almost always make it to the finals and face off against some kind of final boss. And if that sounds simple and kind of vague, that's because it is. This is a very, very simple trope, and it's a surprisingly controversial one.

See, Tournament Arcs, have a bunch of benefits we'll explore shortly and one big problem. They tend to drag on for too long. The final season of Dragon Ball Super is one long Tournament Arc, and it's 55 episodes long. That's 20 hours of tournament. That's a long time to spend on a very simple premise. So, anime fans are kind of divided on whether or not Tournament Arcs are a good idea. Tournament Arcs, along with being drawn out, suffer from predictability.

Presenting stakes to your audience tends to be kind of hard. If you make the stakes too high, the audience knows the heroes can't afford to fail, but if you make them too low, the audience doesn't have a reason to care if the heroes succeed or not. Tournament Arcs have the same problem. Basically, if the audience can tell who's gonna win the tournament before the arc even gets going and if that specific conflict is the main focus of the arc instead of a secondary plot, the audience is gonna be pretty checked out for most of that story since there's no real uncertainty keeping them invested.

For example, if your heroes are participating in the tournament because the Big Bad is forcing them to by, I don't know, kidnapping one of their loved ones, the stakes are high, but the audience investment is low, because of course the heroes are gonna win. Similarly, if the prize of the tournament is some McGuffin our heroes need, we know they're gonna get it.

Now, that actually ties into another trait of the Tournament Arc that can sometimes make it frustrating to watch, and that's the artificiality of the situation. Because like, if the plot of the arc is crazy bad guy wants to do crazy bad guy thing and we have to do whatever it takes to stop them, that's not artificial, that's a dynamic organic situation where you expect the heroes to do everything in their power to succeed, adapting and surprising us in the process. But a Tournament Arc is a completely artificial dynamic. It's got rules, parameters, it's like a game, and our heroes have to advance by winning the game within the constraints of the rules, that's an artificial situation. It can get frustrating if the stakes of victory are crazy high or if the tournament prize is something they really need, and they just go along with the tournament rules instead of, I don't know… Stealing the prize, teaming up against the bad guy, cheating a little bit. Or in this little gem from Dragon Ball Z Abridged:

"Either loosen your moral code, or stop hinging the fate of the world on deathmatches!"

Yeah, that's a biggie… If the tournament stakes are too high, high enough that the heroes really can't afford to lose, you have to explain to the audience why the heroes are even playing along. It's fine if the artificial constraints to the situation frustrate the characters, but if it frustrates the audience, you start having problems. Best example of this issue is in card game anime like Yu-Gi-Oh!, where the narrative gymnastics required to hinge the fate of the world on a card game over and over again get kind of...distracting.

So tournaments can be predictable and artificial, and they can drag on way too long. Part of the problem here is that it's very easy to stretch a tournament out pretty much as long as you want and that's very appealing to anime producers specifically if the manga the anime is based on is running out of content. Tournament Arcs make very easy filler arcs. They basically write themselves, dragging protagonists into a tournament, show off an enormous secondary cast of characters competing in the tournament against them and depending on how long you drag out the individual matches or how many matches between secondary characters you show, you can basically drag it out as long as you want. This is a big part of why so many Tournament Arcs tend to be critically unappealing. They're just designed to fill space. But this is only one reason to do a tournament arc and most of the other reasons are actually really good, so let's get positive and start talking about the benefits.

One huge benefit of the Tournament Arc is that it lets you demo a bunch of new characters all at once. I mean, the tournament can't just be our heroes and one main bad guy, you need a lot of other participants too. So if you want to shake up your cast and intro some new potential secondary protagonists and antagonists, the tournament arc is a very easy way to organically introduce a new crop of weirdos to your main cast.

A related benefit is that the Tournament Arc lets you focus on characters that haven't been fully fleshed out yet. This is because every round in the tournament generally follows the same format. An introductory period of 'What's this guy's deal?', followed by the actual fight, in which the guy's deal is revealed. But this 'What's this guy's deal?' thing can apply to your heroes as well.

A good example of this is from Fairy Tail, which had a short 7-episode Tournament Arc at the end of the first season. Unusually for Tournament Arcs, it wasn't very structured. There weren't any brackets or official matchups. It was more of an impromptu Battle Royale where the bad guy of the arc used some magic to coerce everyone into fighting each other. This did have one major benefit, though. The show has an enormous supporting cast, since the guild has a lot of members, but the first season mostly puts the focus on the four main characters, so up until this point, we haven't really gotten to see what everyone else can do. Getting them all to fight each other does a lot to show off their unique abilities. The most notable example is probably the character Mirajane, a sweet friendly lady whose main abilities seem to be looking cute and being nice. But we've had little hints throughout the first season that there's a lot more to her than that. Like, she's ranked as one of the strongest wizards in the guild, which puts her on par with the main villain of the tournament arc, and significantly stronger than three of the four protagonists. But we've never seen her use her powers for anything really impressive or even fight. They've been dropping hints all season that Mirajane isn't the smiling perky pushover Team Mom she appears to be, so by now, 40 episodes in, everyone's basically thinking 'What's this lady's deal?' And we get to see what her deal is when one of the arc antagonists tries to kill her brother, and she freaks out and turns into this...lingerie model from Hell. Turns out Mirajane's deal is being terrifyingly strong. Now, since this is a Shonen anime, this was kind of a given, but it's still gnarly to watch play out.

So Tournament Arcs let you show off your heroes and their good framing sequences for fun character reveals. The trade-off is that plot-wise, they're not very interesting on their own but that can be counterbalanced by loading on character arcs. So let's take a minute and talk about two Tournament Arcs that I happen to personally like. Yu Yu Hakusho's Dark Tournament Arc, and My Hero Academia's School Festival Arc. Now these two shows are both Shonen anime, but they're very different in a lot of ways.

Most relevant, Yu Yu Hakusho came out in the early 90s and is one of the first and most iconic Shonen anime that helped define the genre in the first place, whereas My Hero Academia is a currently ongoing anime and is certainly framed as sort of a next-generation examination of Shonen tropes. The main cast, both heroes and villains, are explicitly the students, children and proteges of a previous generation that matched the Shonen tropes much more clearly. Most notably, the main character's mentor, All Might, who was very clearly the archetypal Shonen protagonist when he was younger.

So here, we have two Tournament Arcs to look at, one from the beginning of the era, and one from the current state of the genre. This will help us see what's changed, and what's stayed the same.

So, let's start with Yu Yu Hakusho. Yu Yu Hakusho's first season was 25 episodes long, and in that time, our main character Yusuke… *takes a deep breath* ...Got hit by a car and died, smooched his best friend/rival in a dream, fulfilled some trials to come back to life, befriended this cute Death God, ended up with superpowers, got conscripted by the prince of the Spirit World to work for them as a demon-hunting detective, fought a trio of artifact-stealing demons (except one of them wasn't evil and was actually cute and nice, so they became friends), fought through a mini-tournament to earn the right to get trained by this tiny old lady who shares the same voice actor as Frieza, went to Hell to fight this quirky squad of more demons that were using an evil woodwind instrument to bring about a zombie apocalypse, made friends with one of the other evil artifact-stealing demons in the process, puts his shoes on his hands so he can punch the lightning demon without getting zapped, nearly watched his girlfriend die like four times and rescued this cute little ice demon from an evil rich guy harvesting her tears for money. *deep exhale* This is a lot. A lot happens in 25 episodes.

In contrast, the second season, the Dark Tournament Arc, is 40 episodes long and covers a lot less. That said, in that season, there are major character arcs for basically every main character and the result is, it's very interesting to watch. I went through the episodes to see how many of them are like, necessary reviewing, and it's over half of them. That's really impressive for a Tournament Arc. So the premise of this season is that this spooky bad guy from Season 1 named Toguro was like "Wow! This Yusuke kid has a lot of potential. I want to fight him again!" So he tells Yusuke that he was only on 20% power when they fought. You know, that old story. But he wants to fight him for real, so Yusuke needs to compete in this demon tournament called the Dark Tournament, which is like this no-holds-barred murder fest run by a bunch of demons and mafia dudes or whatever and if Yusuke doesn't compete, he'll just kill him and all of his friends. So Yusuke gets his buddies assembled for the tournament. Kuwabara his friend/rival from school, who also randomly developed superpowers in Season 1, and two of the demons he had to fight, Kurama and Hiei.

Now, Kurama is the cute, nice demon guy who's basically only ever been on Yusuke's side. He's also an ancient trickster fox demon in the body of a 15-year-old human dude for slightly complicated reasons, and his character arc is mostly about finding the balance between his new humanity and his demonic nature. Hiei meanwhile, is all-demon and he spent his introduction monologuing and trying to kill Yusuke and turn his girlfriend into a demon. He's kind of a jerk but unsurprisingly, he's also got a heart of gold in there, and his arc is mostly centered on that little ice demon girl they rescued in Season 1 because she's actually his sister and he's pretty hell-bent on keeping her safe, even though she actually doesn't know about their relationship. He's also kind of a Vegeta figure, but mostly just the 'I Must Get Stronger' variety since he used to be super strong, but sacrificed a lot of that to undergo, and I'm not joking, demon plastic surgery to get his third eye implanted. So while Yusuke and Kuwabara are set up to be the fish out-of-water for this arc, dealing with this scary new world of demons and stuff, Kurama and Hiei are both set up for very interesting character arcs, and they get explored.

Before I go into detail, there's a fifth protagonist for this arc. Yusuke's mentor Genkai, who appears in the arc initially disguised, then looking much, much younger than she did in the first season. This is because she's preparing to transfer all of her power to Yusuke and the side effect of that is...Botox, I guess. I really don't know what to call it. Anyway, her deal is that she and the main villain of this arc used to be, like...a thing. And that's a nice character arc, especially since he kills her. She does get better, but still, wow… So all through this Tournament Arc, Yusuke and company are facing off against these teams of demons. And some of them are pretty personable but most of them are garden-variety sadists. There's all kinds of cool flashy fights, but the arc itself focuses almost entirely on the characters.

Yusuke and Kuwabara kind of have the arcs you expect them to have. Yusuke wants to get stronger so that he can protect his friends and beat the bad guy and undergo some very dangerous training to power himself up. While Kuwabara's defining characteristics are basically loyal, honorable, kind of dumb, and super determined, so he spends most of his fights getting the crap kicked out of him until the Power of Friendship and/or Love gives him a boost. Stuff like that. The real interesting character development happens with Kurama and Hiei.

Hiei's arc centers around his struggle to get stronger. Specifically, he manages to get this crazy strong legendary fire power called the Dragon of the Darkness Flame, but he's not at all ready to use it and even though it's incredibly strong and can easily carry him through the tournament if he could get it under control, it nearly costs him an arm the first time he uses it and continues to give him trouble for the rest of the arc. Throughout the arc, he struggles to keep up with his opponents, often having to resort to his ultimate move, even though it's horribly damaging and he doesn't know how to control it yet. But he's a prideful guy so he doesn't speak up about it, even as we do gradually see him soften up to his friends. His aloof personality puts him in contrast with the other heroes, Yusuke especially who's almost aggressively friendly, but Hiei is in a rare position of being a cranky loner character who seems to appreciate his friendlier companions. In fact, it's Yusuke's completely honored faith in him that puts him on his side in the first place. By the end of the arc, Hiei manages to gain control of the dragon by consuming it, giving him all of its power and officially making him ridiculously scary in-universe, closing his power-centered character arc by making him as strong as he needs to be.

Kurama's personal character arc meanwhile, takes an unexpected turn when a weird attack one of his opponents uses temporarily, and accidentally, reverts him to his original demon form, which is way more powerful than his normal mostly-human form and also significantly meaner. This obviously plays into his greater character arc of personal identity. Who he is, how human he is, and how demonic he should strive to be all get confused when he's abruptly restored to his original state and gets to re-experience what he used to be like. What's interesting is that while Kurama is a really nice guy, he does have a noticeable tendency to get scarily efficient in combat, coming off as kind of cold and ruthless when he needs to be. When we see his original personality, it becomes much more clear that this is a very toned down version of the sadistic kind of ruthless efficiency he used to have. His return to his original personality seems to scare him a little, but he recognizes the power he has in that form and willingly transforms in a later match. Though it wears off before he can win and nearly dies. By the end of the arc, he seems to have decided that his human side is more appealing, as his demon personality never really re-asserts itself after this.

Though those two are the standouts in the arc, there's one fantastic scene I have to at least mention, and that's when Kuwabara fakes his own death in the final match so Yusuke gets a final tragic rage powerup to beat the bad guy. And that's amazing. Not the kind of trope-savvy move you'd expect from the dumb rival character.

Anyway, in this show, the tournament arc is a framing sequence that facilitates all these complicated character arcs. There are fights, and they are flashy, but they're basically there to encourage character development. Without the nonstop 'one plot after the other' pace of the first season, the characters can slow down and stretch out. But even then, it's 40 whole episodes. That's like 13 and a half hours. I was considering rewatching it for this Trope Talk and I realized I couldn't do it. I'm sorry. I just don't have the attention span for that.

In contrast, My Hero Academia's Tournament Arc is 11 episodes long. And if you cut out the preamble when they determine who gets to compete in the tournament part, it's only 7 episodes long. That's a leisurely 2 and a half hours. And that's not the only change from the archetypal Tournament Arc. For one thing, our hero, Midoriya, doesn't even make it past the quarterfinals. So here's the quick and easy rundown of the setup in My Hero Academia.

In the world of My Hero Academia, almost everyone has superpowers of one kind or another, and being a superhero is a job you can get by going to a special school for heroes. We've got this kid, Midoriya, who didn't have any superpowers until the world's number 1 hero, All Might, gave him his powers. Now Midoriya has this super-strength power but he can't control it yet, and every time he uses it, he breaks all of his bones. He's going to the super special school for heroes and his goal is to be the greatest hero of all time.

We've also got this walking firecracker Bakugo, who was born with this power to shoot explosions out of his hands. Bakugo has built his entire ego on the premise that he is the best and that he's specifically better than Midoriya, which gets awkward when Midoriya spontaneously develops rad awesome powers and starts winning at everything. Dude's got a complex.

And coming to center stage in this arc specifically is Zuko-looking dude, Shoto Todoroki, whose dad, Endeavor, is the number 2 hero. Now remember how I said that this show is a next generation Shonen? Well, in the previous generation, All Might was the Shonen Hero, the best of the best, the number 1. And Endeavor was the rival, the Lancer, number 2. And he hated it, and they never resolved it. So, he decided to handcraft an heir who would be powerful enough to defeat All Might and become the real strongest hero. In pursuit of this goal, Endeavor sought out a wife with an ice power to compliment his fire power. He's cranked out a bunch of kids until he finally got the one he wanted and put this poor kid, Shoto, through training from Hell, and was a horrible abusive husband and father until his wife had a mental breakdown, couldn't stand the sight of Shoto because half of him looked like Endeavor and poured boiling water on his face. Dude's got a complex.

See? This is what happens when Shonen rivals don't get closure. Now throughout Season 1, the focus is mostly on Midoriya getting into the superhero school and finding his footing. We don't see much of Shoto. He's around in the background, but we only really see him using his powers and he doesn't talk much, but just before the Tournament Arc starts he tells Midoriya "Hey. Hey, listen. You're like All Might's favorite, right? Well, I'm going to destroy you. Okay, bye." And everyone's like "Eh, what?"

After some other Sports Festival shenanigans happens, Shoto tracks down Midoriya and explains his tragic backstory and basically says "Listen, you're All Might's protege, and you have suspiciously similar powers to him. So symbolically, if I beat you using only my ice powers, it'll be like I beat All Might without using any of my dad's power. I'll be disowning my dad by rejecting his power and giving him the ultimate middle finger by doing exactly what he wanted me to do but wrong." And Midoriya's like "It sounds like you need therapy. Oh, I have an idea!" And then when they fight each other in the tournament, Midoriya fights like crazy, breaks all the bones in his fingers to get his powers working, and goads Shoto into fighting for real so he can finally confront his self-loathing and recognize that he doesn't need to define himself opposite his father's expectations, because there's no better therapy than combat therapy. Anyway, during the fight, Midoriya's passionate words and flagrant disregard for his own wellbeing move Shoto to his very core and he stops holding back and immediately destroys Midoriya and wins the match.

Which was awkward because Bakugo was on track to be in the final match because he had just beaten Midoriya's best friend/love interest, and the proper Shonen thing to do would been to send Midoriya to the final match of the tournament so he can duel his ultimate rival all hopped up on 'How Dare You Hurt My Friend!' juice. Instead, Bakugo gets stuck with his leftovers, and it's hilarious how angry this makes him. "Why don't you fight me like that? Am I not good enough for you, Deku?!" *coughs* Seriously, how does he do that? Even more awkward, when Shoto and Bakugo face off in the final match, Shoto starts to go all-out, but then he remembers that therapy doesn't work like that and he isn't quite ready to use his fire power again. So instead, he lets Bakugo KO him with his big flashy final move, and Bakugo is so angry that they need to literally chain him to the podium when they're handing out the medals. Hell, if you look for it, there's a very entertaining running theme through the show where Bakugo's frustration's almost entirely stemmed from the fact that Midoriya has better things to do than cater to his rivalry complex. He's busy doing school and trying not to break all his fingers and stuff. Bakugo's very much the hero of his own story and he's so frustrated that nobody sees him that way. It's rough being the rival when you think you're the protagonist.

But again, like Yu Yu Hakusho, this Tournament Arc only exists to facilitate crazy character development. In fact, I'd also say that it's something of a deliberate fakeout. We all know how these tournaments are supposed to go. If My Hero Academia went through the numbers, then Midoriya would've beaten Shoto in the quarterfinals, and then won him over because Defeat Means Friendship, spent the semifinals sparing with Iida, and faced off in the finals against his super villainous rival Bakugou, who would've riled him up earlier by kicking his sweet faced bestie/future girlfriend around like a football. They would have fought and maybe Midoriya would've won or maybe he wouldn't have, it doesn't really matter at that point, since the only stakes were popularity.

But nothing plays out like we expect. Hell, even the love interest vs jerkface rival thing doesn't go how you think. It's actually a really close fight and when the audience starts getting pissy because Bakugo fought her so hard, because "Look, she's just a sweet delicate girl. How dare you fight her for real!" Their homeroom teacher calls them out for being sexist patronizing dicks and mistaking acknowledging a worthy opponent who nearly wiped him out with a meteor storm for battering a helpless little girl around. Seriously, My Hero Academia takes no prisoners when it comes to Trope Subversion. Man, I hope it stays good.

So basically, Tournament Arcs have a bit of an iffy reputation for being poorly paced and predictable, which is honestly pretty earned but they're an excellent tool for facilitating all kinds of character arcs, and if you do that, they can be incredibly interesting to watch, as long as you don't spend too much time lingering on the actual fights.

Thank you so much for listening. If you have any requests, let me know in the comments, and I hope you enjoyed.


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